ROOTS & BRANCHES

Combining genealogy and DNA has been on an increasingly logarithmic path in the last 15 years or so. I have been mostly an outside observer to whole technology march (not just in genealogy – I’m pretty scrupulous about making sure my iPhone is at least one version – and maybe two! – behind the latest …

The symbolism often found engraved on tombstones – as well as their symbolic value as perhaps the closest “representation” of an ancestor before photography – has long endeared genealogists to the markers and graveyards. So it’s fitting that the upcoming “Genealogy Conference 2017” sponsored by Kutztown University’s Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center has as its …

There’s something about old books with handwritten information in them that makes a genealogist’s ears prick up and take notice. Recently an e-mail came in to your “Roots & Branches” columnist from the Palatines to America, an organization oriented toward German genealogy, about how to market a copy of the Martyrs Mirror dating to 1814. …

Thomas Jay Kemp has had a varied career in the larger genealogical world, especially in the library portion of that world. He’s been in charge of the two largest genealogical libraries in the Northeast – the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania – before becoming director of genealogy products at …

When the announcement hit the “social media-sphere” a week ago that FamilySearch was discontinuing its longtime service of providing rentals of the microfilms from its huge collection of worldwide records, my first reaction was one of nostalgia. Just a few years after I began researching my genealogy in the mid-1980s, I encountered a brick wall …